Purgatory no more.
I write this from a hotel room.
Hotel and motel rooms have played an ominous part in my history.
They were the places I'd scurry off to, to hide in the shadows and self-destroy.
The first time I did this was in 2009, I think. Sometime around then. I was supposed to go on a road trip with my family, out to the Pacific Northwest.
The night before we were to leave, I scurried out to a motel in a nearby town, really having no self-awareness at all into why I was doing this. I bought liquor and ordered pizza, and drank and ate myself into some kind of purgatory.
Purgatory is a great word for it. It's like being stuck between places. There was this hope that what I was doing would bring some kind of relief. That it would scratch the itch of my void.
But that's not how it worked...
The alcohol and food didn't hit the spot. They only put me in a state of boredom and longing. There was nothing I could do. Nothing outside of myself that I could put in myself, that would ever make me feel better.
But I certainly tried. First in 2009, and then several more times through the subsequent years.
It happened again when I was attending the "Advanced" sessions of some self-improvement spectacle called Landmark Forum. I sat through an hour of the thing, feeling entirely out of my element with it, feeling like I was too small and limited and dysfunctional to match pace with all the Tony Robbins wannabes at that forum.
So, I proved how dysfunctional I was, with another classic liquor and pizza binge at the most ironically-named motel of all-time: America's Best.
(If that place is the best America has to offer, America is in deeper shit than I thought.)
Again, no relief. Only restlessness. Part of these strange excursions was that no one knew where I was. It was just my demons and I, the rest of the world could just deal with my non-participation in it.
I'm realizing now, the town I hid out at in 2009 is the same town I drove to the morning after my purgatory night at America's Best (probably around 2013). It's Mason, Michigan, the town I spent my rather disjointed teenage life.
I went there and just roamed around, and went to some places of special significance in my memory. It's like I was looking for clues to my brokenness, by searching my past. But I found nothing that provided solace.
In 2015 I got back into some drugs I hadn't used in a long time, so my purgatory excursions took on some slightly more messed-up characteristics.
It was some of the insanest stuff. I'd take copious amounts of dissociatives, expecting to trip my way to some kind of relief or distraction from the pain of being me. Not only was there no relief, but for some reason I didn't even "trip" at least not in a usual sense.
Something about being in those dirty motels, the desperation and the concession to self-destruction, completely removed any positive-feeling effects of those drugs.
Instead, I'd just lay there, staring at the ceiling, hallucinating voices of loved one's just outside the door, hearing them have conversations about me. Hearing them say the things I wished they'd say to me in person, or other times hearing them say the things I feared the most.
My experiences in motels and hotels by myself. The drugged out times far outnumber the clear-headed and hearted times.
I am in recovery now. Staying clean is the bedrock of my life. I've learned that I can't satiate my inner restlessness with anything outside of myself. Ever. Not sustainably, and not effectively.
I came to this hotel to get some short-term respite. I'm a full-time caregiver, which is a great honor and privilege. But I just needed a couple days to take care of myself and rest.
My mental association with hotels led me to wonder if this was going to be difficult for me. Was it going to trigger memories and compulsions?
Thankfully, that hasn't been the case. Now I see that my association with being alone in hotel rooms can change. And that is excellent.
I am being restored. Being playful. About to take a hot Epsom salt bath (one of my favorite pastimes in the world).
So thankful that the past is the past. That so much of the chaotic nightmare that has characterized my earlier life has abated.
That's possible because of a gradual process I've been in over the years, of slowly coming around to getting more real with myself. And working on better habits when it comes to what I do physically in the world, and what I do internally in my mind. Refining beliefs, throwing away what shoots me in the foot, experimenting until I find more optimal configurations.
Life's never going to be perfect, and that's perfect.
But I am not in purgatory today. And that's just ballin'.